1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to computer enterprise network management and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for optimizing computer network bandwidth usage to prevent congestion where at least one data transfer operation is throttled based on a current network load.
2. Description of the Related Art
A computing environment for an enterprise provides various computer resources (e.g., storage, network, file system, backup, restore and/or the like) to one or more client computers. Furthermore, one or more data storage devices are employed to maintain various data (e.g., application data, financial data and/or the like) to be used by the one or more client computers. In some computing environments, the data is transmitted to the one or more data storage devices through a computer network infrastructure.
Typically, various processes for protecting the data used by the one or more client computers are performed by one or more configurations within the computing environment. For example, the data used by the one or more client computers is copied or backed up to the one or more data storage devices in order to prevent any loss in productivity caused by data corruption or any other disaster (e.g., natural disaster, power shortage and/or the like) within the computing environment. Once such a backup process is complete, critical data may be restored after such a disaster. As a result, the one or more client computers resume operations within the computing environment.
Conventional backup processes consume computer networking resources to store data on the one or more data storage devices. A backup process copies critical data that is stored locally in a volume at a client computer, such as a desktop computer. The backup process utilizes an amount network bandwidth to transmit the critical data through a computer network for storage as a backup image (e.g., one or more files representing the volume) at another location (i.e., a remote location). For example, the critical data is written to a single shared file system (e.g., a volume on a disk) through one or more components of a Storage Area Network (SAN) architecture.
Network congestion is a problem caused when a number of running backup processes exceeds a capacity of the computer network. Naturally, as the number of processes being performed with the computer network increases, available bandwidth decreases. The backup process must share the network bandwidth with other processes including other backup processes being performed within the computing environment. Due to the importance of the backup processes for the operations of the computing environment, any network congestion poses a risk to the enterprise.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for optimizing computer network bandwidth usage to prevent network congestion where at least one backup process data transfer operation is throttled based on a current network load.